An application server may host several applications (e.g., an enterprise software application such as Oracle®, FoundationIP®, etc.) that may be accessed through a network (e.g., internet, WAN, LAN, etc.) by multiple clients. A backup server may be used to continuously backup the application server (e.g., by having substitute copies and/or backup copies) through the network in an asynchronous manner (e.g., by not awaiting a write confirmation from the backup server during a continuous backup). A memory buffer of the application server may be used to buffer a backup data (e.g., by providing temporary storage) during the asynchronous backup operation. Data (e.g., backup data) in the memory buffer may be wiped out when the application server shuts down due to a certain event (e.g., a shutdown event, a power failure, etc.) resulting in a loss of the backup data. As a result, the backup server may not have a complete backup of the application server. The backup data may be unusable (e.g., corrupt and/or incomplete) as a result of the backup data loss.
Moreover a capacity of the memory buffer of the application server may be limited. A data backlog may be created in the memory buffer due to an unstable transfer rate of the backup data from the memory buffer to the backup server (e.g., due to limited bandwidth, a slow backup server, etc.). This may lead to a memory overflow and/or a memory crash that may instigate the backup data loss. Efforts to page the memory may be thwarted owing to a recursion that may arise when a paged memory attempts a write to a page file (e.g., due to unnecessary copies of the paged write created by a filter driver used in the continuous backup system) on a file system (e.g., Windows file system) of the application server. This may in turn lead to a system crash.
A consistent backup data (e.g., restorable backup data) may be generated by creating a snapshot (e.g., an image) of the data present on a storage device of the application server. The system may need considerable resources (e.g., disk space) to store the snapshot of the storage device of the application server on the backup server. Moreover, it may take a considerable amount of time to generate and store the snapshot of the storage device. An administrator and/or user (e.g., application server manager) may in turn have to limit and/or curtail the frequency of application consistency operations. As a result, the backup data may be inconsistent, unusable and/or incomplete.